Justice wrote:Since Islam has many things in common with Christianity, would it be true to label it as a Christian heresy?

Yes. Muhammed had many friends who were Nestorians and some who were Jews.Perhaps this is one reason why the Quran calls Christians and Jews, People of the Book (referring to the Bible).

There are other threads at E Cafe, and then blogs and websites on the Internet which discuss Islamic customs, which have been liberally borrowed from the ancient Jews and Christians, and also from pagan influences, such as those who worship the Moon god.

A few of these traditions and customs include:

Prostrations (Orthodox Monks usually do 300 prostrations or more per day)Head coverings for women (ancient Jews and Christians up until the 20th century always covered their hair)Hours of prayers (We Orthodox Christians have many more hours of prayers than do Muslims, including Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers. There are also the prayers of Great Vespers, the All-night Vigil, the Sacraments, the Funeral Services, Paraclesis to various saints and the Theotokos, Akathist Hymns to various saints and the Theotokos, the Presanctified LIturgy, and the Divine Liturgy.)Clerical dress, liturgical vestments, and long monastic robes for menModest dress for womenSacred writings (Our Holy Bibie,. both the Old Testament and the New Testmant outdates the Quran) Sacred Spaces -- architecture, which the Muslims heavily borrowed or stole from us, for example, Agia SophiaRites of Initiation: Circumcision (for Jews) and Baptism, Chrismation, and Holy Communion (for Christians)

fschmidt wrote:I don't understand how Islam can be considered a Christian heresy when it isn't Christian to being with.

Islam is a new and still developing religion with its heretical roots being a mixture of various pagan practices, Christianity (Nestorian heresy) and Judaism. Its founder was Muhammed (a mere man born of a mere woman), but Muhammed acknowledges that Christ (Isa) was born of the Virgin Mary (Miriam). Because Muhammed heavily borrowed from the Christian heresy attributed to Nestorian, Islam can be said to be a Christian heresy.

I have known some former Jews who were raised in the Islamic faith, but who privately practiced Judaism in their home. They denied Judaism to save their skins. When they fled to the USA, they openly embraced Judaism, but some of them started looking into Christianity for the first time as they recognized Jesus and Mary (Miriam) who are mentioned in the Quran. Then they converted to Christianity.

While Judaism can be traced back to Abraham, Christianity has its roots in Jesus Christ, our Eternal Lord God and Savior, who was incarnated in time (born a Jew of the Virgin Mary without the seed of an earthly father). St. Joseph was his guardian.

[T]he greatest and most subtle theologian of the early church, St. John Damascene, was convinced that Islam was at root not a separate religion, but instead a form of Christianity. St. John had grown up in the Ummayad Arab court of Damascus, where his father was chancellor, and he was an intimate boyhood friend of the future Caliph al-Yazid; the two boys’ drinking bouts in the streets of Damascus were the subject of much horrified gossip in the streets of the new Islamic capital. Later, in his old age, John took the habit at the desert monastery of Mar Saba where he began work on his great masterpiece, a refutation of heresies entitled the Fount of Knowledge. The book contains an extremely precise and detailed critique of Islam, the first ever written by a Christian, which, intriguingly, John regarded as a form of Christian heresy related to Arianism: after all Arianism, like Islam, denied the divinity of Christ. Although he lived at the very hub of the early Islamic world, it never seems to have occurred to him that Islam might be a separate religion. If a theologian of the stature of John Damascene was able to regard Islam as a new- if heretical- form of Christianity, it helps to explain how Islam was able to convert so much of the Middle Eastern population in so short a time, even though Christianity remained the majority religion until the time of the Crusades.

The longer you spend in the Christian communities of the Middle East, the more you become aware of the extent to which Eastern Christian practice formed the template for what were to become the basic conventions of Islam. The Muslim form of prayer with its bowings and prostrations appears to derive from the older Syrian Orthodox tradition that is still practised in pewless churches across the Levant. The architecture of the earliest minarets, which are square rather than round, unmistakably derive from the church towers of Byzantine Syria. The Sufi Muslim tradition carried on directly from the point that the Christian Desert Fathers left off while Ramadan, at first sight one of the most foreign and alienating of Islamic practices, is in fact nothing more than an Islamicisation of Lent, which in the Eastern Christian churches still involves a gruelling all-day fast.Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/orthodixie ... 3WahlOl.99